HR1, the first bill that the new Democratic House of Representatives will vote on, is omnibus legislation that takes on some of the most pervasive scourges of representative democracy: vote suppression, oligarchic campaign financing and gerrymandering. Read the rest

Proud Democratic Socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez ran an insurgent campaign (working nights as a bartender in NYC with her campaigning clothes stashed in a paper bag behind the bar, changing after her shift and working the streets) that conquered New York, went national, and emboldened a "progressive caucus" of new Democratic legislators: now she's going to Congress to serve as the youngest woman ever elected to the lower house. Only one problem: she can't afford to rent a DC apartment for the three months between the election and her swearing-in, when she'll start drawing her Congressional salary. Read the rest

The 78-member Congressional Progressive Caucus is meant to be the democracy-friendly, corporate-hostile wing of the Democratic Party, which is why the caucus announced a year ago that it would stop accepting corporate money -- but a year later, nearly every member is still accepting corporate money in their individual capacity. Read the rest

The Democrats' newly unveiled "Internet Bill of Rights" enumerates ten rights that the party says it will enshrine in law, ranging from Net Neutrality to data portability to timely notification of breaches to opt-in for data collection, the right to see the data held on you by surveillance capitalists, rights to privacy and to be free from surveillance-driven discrimination, pro-competitive measures and so forth. Read the rest

MiniVAN (Android, Iphone) is a mobile app designed for volunteers who canvas door-to-door during election seasons; though the app has been around since 2010, it's seeing a surge in popularity, with 218,189 logged-in users in the 2018 midterm season, compared with the 153,513 users in the 2016 presidential race. Read the rest

California's Democratic Governor Jerry Brown repeatedly vetoed universal healthcare after the state legislature voted it through; Democratic state majorities in NY, CT and NJ refused to enact legislation to close the "carried interest" tax loophole that makes billions for hedge-fund managers; Rhode Island Democrats went on a slashing spree, taking down pensions for teachers, firefighters and other public servants while the finance-affiliated state treasurer funneled the pension funds into her pals' underperforming hedge funds; Democrats in NJ gutted the tax bill to give millionaires an easy ride; New York Democrat Governor Andrew Cuomo shut down the state anti-corruption commission, only to have his top aide busted for being horrifically corrupt. Read the rest

There's one thing that Democratic and Republican leaders agree on: that left-wing policies like Medicare for all are bad news for the Democratic policy -- the only people who disagrees with them are voters, who overwhelmingly support these policies. Read the rest

The Democratic National Committee called the FBI Tuesday, after discovering what the DNC says was the early phase of a sophisticated phishing attempt to hack its voter database. Read the rest

Newt Gingrich's 1995 Republican Revolution dismantled all the expert departmentsand bureaus that Congress depended on to make sense of the world, making lawmakers dependent on corporate lobbyists to advise them on everything from pollution to food safety to military technology to mass surveillance -- nearly 25 years later, Washington DC is a literal and figurative swamp, and only 18% of Americans say they trust Congress. Read the rest

Zephyr Teachout (previously) is a netroots pioneer, a leading competition law scholar, and a progressive candidate for the Democratic nomination for Attorney General of New York State. Read the rest

Jeff Greene is a billionaire who made his fortune shorting subprime real-estate while Floridians were facing mass evictions; now he's hoping to be the Democratic candidate for Governor of Florida and his financial disclosures reveal a raft of extremely toxic investments, including millions in Puerto Rican debt (Florida is full of Puerto Rican refugees who had to flee their homes after debt-holders starved the state of infrastructure money so it could neither defend itself against hurricanes, nor rebuild in their wake), Argentinian debt (another go-to for vulture capitalists), and "oil and gas stocks Exxon, Hess, Kinder Morgan, and Apache." Read the rest

Zephyr Teachout (previously) isn't just an expert on antitrust law and corruption, and isn't merely a netroots pioneer who has been on the right side of every technology policy fight since the Gore years -- she's also running to be the Attorney General of the State of New York, from which position she plans on gutting Trump on his corrupt business practices, targeting him using the dread emoluments clause. Read the rest

Despite being home to millions of sensible people, including a large bloc of potentially progressive Latinx voters, Arizona keeps elevating billionaire-friendly (and billionaire backed) white supremacist authoritarians to high office. Read the rest

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (previously) stunned the Democratic establishment when she comprehensively kicked the ass of finance-friendly, seemingly untouchable Democrat-in-name-only incumbent Joe Crowley in a New York City primary race that she won on a Democratic Socialist platform of abolishing ICE, Medicare for all, a jobs guarantee, a housing guarantee, gun control, relief for Puerto Rico, and gun control. Read the rest

When Bernie Sanders made a bid for the Democratic presidential candidacy in 2016 with a pledge of "Medicare For All," the party establishment (coffers fattened with money from the health insurance industry) claimed that the policy was a nonstarter that would never find popular support. Read the rest

Democratic Socialist heroine Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (previously) is heading to Congress this fall, and though she's promised not to blow up the Democratic party when she gets there, she's not going to let the pro-finance establishment roll over her. Read the rest

Kevin De León has done the impossible: he flipped nearly every undecided vote on the California Democratic Party executive board to win the party's endorsement in the upcoming Senate race with 65% of the vote, defeating the incumbent, far-right Democrat Dianne Feinstein, who has a long track record of backing the finance industry, war, and mass surveillance -- who scored a mere 7% of the vote. Read the rest